New Alabama DHR commissioner puts experience to the test

One gets a sense, even during a long-distance telephone conversation, that Nancy Buckner isn't going to suffer fools gladly.

No, Buckner didn't hang up on me.

But the new commissioner for the state Department of Human Resources, with only a few days on the job, exudes confidence and self-assurance. After 35 years working in just about every area of DHR responsibility, she knows the agency inside out. While DHR is an enormous bureaucracy, covering child welfare, adult services, food stamps, welfare, adoptions, subsidized child care and child support, Buckner doesn't seem to be one to get stuck in the muck.

Nancy Buckner

"I'm not somebody a con artist would enjoy talking to," Buckner says. "I'm direct. A real straight shooter. And I'd like people to be direct with me."

Yes, that's Buckner's reputation, and that may be just what DHR needs in this post-R.C. world. Buckner is the first DHR chief in nearly two decades who isn't working under the federal consent decree to improve child welfare known as "R.C.," the initials of the boy who initiated that court case in 1988.

"My top priority is to keep delivering the level of services we deliver in light of the tight budget times," Buckner says. "There's nothing more serious to me than the welfare of a child or vulnerable adult."

That's the place to start, because child welfare is what most people think of when they think of DHR. It's the area of responsibility that gets the most public attention, but it isn't, by any means, all DHR is about.

Buckner's varied experiences at the county level should serve her well in the big office in Montgomery. Her jobs at DHR have included lobbying the Legislature, reorganizing child welfare divisions in two counties, and working in child support and food stamps.

"Coming from where I come from, I see how interwoven our services are," Buckner says. "In the majority of child welfare cases -- not all, but a majority -- there's a need for food stamps and child support and sometimes TANF (welfare)."

Still, with 3½ decades immersed in the DHR culture, isn't there also a risk Buckner will be defensive, overprotective or resistant to change?

"I'm not going to tell you we don't make mistakes," Buckner says. "I just hope we don't make a mistake that's detrimental. That's the key thing."

And by "detrimental," Buckner means a child or senior adult being harmed because of some lapse at DHR.

"Those mistakes are not acceptable to me," Buckner says, and there's a certain, well, certainty in those words.

To prevent those terrible mistakes where a child is hurt or worse, "you've got to stay focused," Buckner says. "That's what I've told the staff though the years."

Stay. Focused. On. The. Child.

"Don't ever lose sight of that," she says. "You might have four more issues out there, but you can't get caught up in that. Go back and look into those little eyes you're supposed to be protecting, or that elderly person. That's the pivotal point of your work, the center. You work out from there, from the center."

Actually, it sounds pretty simple.

"Sometimes it doesn't have to be so complicated," Buckner says. "That's one thing I've been pretty good at, how to break it down. Sometimes we make more out of it than it needs."

A long-time criticism of DHR -- by this newspaper and by observers in and out of the state -- is that the agency hides its mistakes behind confidentiality laws.

The hope, of course, is there won't be a test case, because that'll mean something has gone terribly wrong -- again. In that respect, Buckner bucks up:

"If we're not doing something right, I'm not going to stand up and tell you it's right," she says. "I don't think it's my way or the highway, either. But if you say something, and I think you're flat wrong, I'm going to tell you I disagree."

We can live with that.

Joey Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is an editorial writer, blogger and editor of the Sunday Commentary section for The News.